I wonder where some attorneys get their education

I feel your pain Stacy. Last year I had the misfortune to try and work with an attorney on what was supposed to be an ALTA survey. Of course, he wanted to get me his title opinion 2 weeks after we furnished him a final plat and report.

I kept after him about the easement associated with a major power line. He kept saying it was no big deal. (It was a big deal.)

I had to keep asking over and over for the deed where the seller's family acquired the property. The seller had inherited "all her father's property" and her father had inherited "all his father's property".

The first deed reference the attorney sent took me less than 3 minutes to determine belonged to a tract 2 miles down the road. The second deed he sent failed to cover ~ 18 acres of the 50 they wanted me to survey. Finally the attorney got tired of me asking and told me he was the one who was certifying the title and why did I care where they got the land.

Larry P

>I wonder where some attorneys get their education

From surveyors. 😉

Seriously, your average attorney has one semester of law school to cover every aspect of real estate law - if it's the fourth Tuesday of the semester, today must be condominium day. I'll take an attorney who asks a lot of questions and needs a lot of hand holding over one that thinks he learned everything there is to know about property law in six hours of class lecture twenty years ago.

One of the most prominent land use lawyers in my area once called me regarding a complicated ALTA survey we were working on and asked me to explain how an appeals court decision concerning the abandonment of an old trolly line in the area affected where the right of way line was located on one of the parcels. Now that's an attorney who knows how to get an education.

:good: :good:

That is very, very true. The smart attorneys have learned to gain knowledge from the experts......boundary surveyors. They rarely deal with the very things we deal with routinely. With our guidance they can start doing their own research into the specific legal topics necessary for the project at hand.

Prime examples of this came about while providing assistance in two court cases. In both cases, the attorneys knew very little about boundary surveying and required a great deal of guidance. They were great in court, but only after spending many hours learning what they needed to know.

This comes about because many clients view their attorney as a jack-of-all-trades who should be able to properly handle any issue they need addressed. This is akin to asking any one of us to tackle Scott Zelenak's tower building project one day, Kent McMillan's trek through the Great American Desert the next and Daryl Moistner's tundra surveying the following day. We possess a license that suggests we might be able to provide such work with competence. Reality is a much different thing.

> We finished a large boundary survey about 2 weeks ago. Since completion we have had numerous emails and phone calls from an attorney wanting explanations. I have all but lost my patience.

It seems to me that you have misunderstood the concept of billable hours. The attorney's object is to generate them and yours should be to assist him or her in doing so, but at the most minimal expense to your client. What I think you'll discover is that the attorney on the other end of the transaction has some magic number in mind which when reached will immediately cause all objections previously raised to dissolve. An intelligent surveyor's strategy should revolve around helping the attorney to reach their target of billable hours without, of course actually having to bill one's client for participating.

" Where do these guys go to school?"

At the school of making money. Every phone call is generating money for him in the form of billable hours. And as painful as each dumb question is for you, each one becomes seared into your memory and you become a valuable witness for him if his client asks him to itemize the hours that he bills them. "See on this plat!- it took me two calls to that surveyor to get him to include the name of this road that you found on that rock!"

In some ways... it is nice to get an attorney, who knows little about land issues.... The ones that KNOW it all, and do stupid stuff, are much worse.
N

I've done several surveys of late for attorneys, surveying their personal holdings for them. One of them researched surveying before hiring me. He spoke of visiting SurveyConnect quite extensively in his quest for knowledge about the boundary issues he was in need of rectifying.

Consider if you were visiting another profession's forum and came across postings bashing incompetent surveyors. Would that jade your opinion of those posters who chose to publicly ridicle the survey profession? Would that lower your opinion of the particular profession those posters were part of?

I simply ask that we all think before we post, about how you are representing your own profession to the public. It is not solely surveyors who read SurveyConnect and this type of negative attack on others.

> I simply ask that we all think before we post, about how you are representing your own profession to the public. It is not solely surveyors who read SurveyConnect and this type of negative attack on others.

I, on the other hand, encourage other surveyors to be condescending and dismissive toward attorneys, design professionals, and all others who may be potential long term clients. Helps my bottom line

I once collected $15k in additional fees on a basic commercial ALTA that initially cost about $7k.

Those attorney comments were never ending.

> I once collected $15k in additional fees on a basic commercial ALTA that initially cost about $7k.

You cover your costs on the sale of the car, the extended warranty and optional undercoating are the profit centers 😀

Most Attorneys are easy to work with. The problem arises when you are dealing with a paralegal. All of those pin heads need to be rounded up and sent to a desert island somewhere.
During a review of one of my drawings the Attorney asked his paraillegal why she wanted me to add a certain item to the plat. Her response was, "That's a "standard drafting practice"." I asked her how many semesters she had of drafting training and the response was the expected "None.". I did not add that particular item to my drawing.

The questions I was fielding were ones that I would expect a layperson to understand. "What is a woods road?" Does it take a surveyor to figure that one out?

I don't think it would jade my opinion. It may even persuade some attorneys to try and learn a little more to keep from sounding so ignorant. We seem to ridicule/bash other members of our own profession that aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer and I've heard attorneys bashing other attorneys. Most, I'm sure, would understand that I am not ridiculing the entire profession, just the kindergarten students of law. Just my humble opinion.

I once prepared an ALTA survey with the note "gravel drive fords creek". The revised title policy came back with a title exception for "rights of others in and to Ford's Creek"